Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

He did. I felt the engine race when the clutch was in. Arcinella rushed toward her rendezvous with the bulkhead. Then Dave must have released the clutch pedal, because Arcinella shuddered, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then stalled, and silently glided smoothly, swiftly, single-mindedly toward the bulkhead.

Mr. Yummy looked at the bulkhead. He looked at Dave in the wheelhouse. He looked at Sam, who was watching the bulkhead grow ever nearer and opening and closing his mouth without making a sound. He looked at me. “Hey,” he said, and by that I think he meant that Arcinella seemed likely to strike the bulkhead with force sufficient to do some harm. “Hey!” he said again, louder, and by that I think he meant that this was trouble.

“She’s gonna — ” came out of Sam.

“Somebody — ” said Mr. Yummy.

“Do something!” said Sam.

Impulsively, desperately, Mr. Yummy reached out for a piling as Arcinella glided past it. He threw his arms around it and tried to brace his feet to slow the boat, but the momentum was too great and he was swept from the deck and left clinging to the pile.

Arcinella struck the bulkhead, shook herself like a wet dog, then rebounded in the direction of the opposite bank. I dashed into the wheelhouse, restarted the engine, and, with Dave standing glum and mute beside me, brought her in sweet and slow, and this time her bow didn’t even touch the bulkhead.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, we were all on shore. We stood there, lined up along the bulkhead, looking at Arcinella. I had my hands in my pockets, and I was rocking on my heels a bit. If I had had a pipe — not a briar, like Dudley’s, but a corncob pipe like Captain Mac’s — I would have been puffing it.

“Well,” I said, breaking the silence after a while, “she looks okay. I doubt that you’ve done her any real harm.” I paused, and then added with a shrug, “Of course, I can’t say for sure that you haven’t, and I can’t take responsibility if you have.”

Chapter 54

Good-bye, Old Boat

FOR TEN MORE NIGHTS I played the part of the Night Bailer of Babbington, slipping through the shadows and pumping Arcinella, bailing her out, blowing her up, keeping her afloat, but I did what Captain Mac had done, leaving more water in her bilge each night, and on the tenth night, leaving the water above the planks, I coiled my hoses over my arm, pitched the jet pump into the bay, said good-bye, and walked away.

Not long after, probably at night, some night while I lay in my bed at home, sleeping in a stream of neutrinos, baywater rose in Arcinella’s bilge until it filled her, and, unattended and alone, she sank.

I learned about it from Raskol the next day, at school.

“Hey,” he said, rushing past me in the hall, “Captain Mac’s old boat sank. Right at the dock. I heard that the guys who bought her from you aren’t even going to bother bringing her up.”

THAT THANKSGIVING, when we had finished dinner, after my grandparents had gone home and my father was snoozing in his chair, my mother said, “I’d like to see her.”

I knew who she meant. “So would I,” I said.

We got into my mother’s car and drove to Patti’s, and then the three of us drove to Arcinella’s slip. We got out of the car and walked to the edge of the bulkhead, where we stood looking down through the murky water at Arcinella’s graceful shape and muted pastels. The thought occurred to me that if I had a few dozen inner tubes and an air hose I could probably raise her, but I kept it to myself.

“I feel that we ought to say something,” said my mother. “Like something over a grave, or a burial at sea.”

To the great surprise of my mother and me, and perhaps to Patti herself, Patti began to sing a doo-wop version of Stanza XI of Wallace Stevens’s “Esthetique du Mal.” I improvised backup as well as I could.

This left the three of us quite choked up. My mother, who was standing between us, put her arm across our shoulders and gave us a squeeze. She sighed and smiled and shook her head and said, “She gave us quite a ride.”

“Yes, she did,” I said.

“She blew me up,” said Patti, “filled me full of hot air.”

“She was truly inflationary,” I said, “a gasser — a jet pump!”

“A blow job!” said Patti impulsively, and the three of us burst into adolescent laughter.

“Oh, I loved it all!” said my mother, sobering, hugging herself, and shivering a bit. She turned and started for the car, and Patti and I followed. Along the way, she asked, “But do you know what was the best of the best, the best part, the very best part of all?”

“The day we were lost in the fog?” suggested Patti.

“The day — ” I began, and then stopped. I had intended to suggest the day when my father had tried to tell my mother that he admired what she had accomplished, but I could feel my embarrassment before I even said it. “I don’t know,” I said. “What was the best part?”

We got into the car.

“For me,” said my mother, “it was the night ‘Lord Caught-yer-cough’ sailed with us. He really enjoyed himself!”

She started the car and put it in gear.

“He even ate the sandwiches,” she said. “He ate them all!”

She drove off.

“He probably would have eaten the Chartreuse Chips if I’d had them,” she ventured.

She drove on for a couple of blocks in silence.

Then she said, “Maybe not.”

Chapter 55

And Then . . .

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS of the lunch launch, my mother seemed unable to fail. She had succeeded once, and that was all fate seemed to require for entry into the successful-business club. On the scale of businesses that she